A fun little game I played after pressing “Continue” on every Stranger Ethics draft was to hit the Pangram integration’s “Scan for AI text” button. After certifying my first nine pieces “100% human,” this company’s tool judged my tenth essay (The Bigger the Market, the Stranger the Person) to be “100% AI.”
Was it something I said? is what I would think if it had teased me with, say, “95% AI.” Maybe it was that sentence where I mentioned “the mechanism,” a phrase already becoming cringe and semantically bleached in 2026, the way “delve” was in 2024.
Actually, I didn’t think in sentences at all. I felt anger, shame, and then relief. For two years, I had tabooed certain words, preserved typos, and signaled personal, human attention through cute local references or cultural allusions. Now I reject the premise.
A “100% human” response to having your handwritten words declared inauthentic might read, “Fuck you, Pangram!” But that’s not how I’m wired. I love steelmen. I love arguments that survive the speaker being cast out of the village because he’s a clanker.
You might support free speech for radical preachers, but do you support free speech for robots? What about the English language learner who co-writes with one to fix up her grammar? Maybe even probing the boundary itself is enough to contaminate me.
I don’t want you to read my ideas because I wrote them and you like me. If you hate my vibe, please stay away from me physically. But keep my earworms. Spread the virtues of impersonality with or without attribution. Hell, say you got the idea from AI.